Shared Stories

With the term "shared stories," we refer to the exchange of life histories; that is, to tell another the events that have occurred in your life with the goal of recalling the parts that constitute our present. We appropriate several of the tools of narrative investigation with the objective of discovering the questions that preoccupy the participants. Life history, following Measor, "as biography gives us a respectable manner to deal with our desire to obtain, starting from other's existences, the evidence that we are not alone with our difficulties, sufferings, pleasures and necessities" (Measor and Sikes, 2003). Life history as a method of mutual understanding permits us to establish strong links of communication that foster reflection by the prisoners about their past and current existence. The place that they, and we as well, occupy in society along with the contradictions that construct us as people are important questions for this proposal. These reflections, initiated by this project, have their roots in these shared stories.